Assignment - IT's Strategic and Operational Support in Your Business
Purpose
At the highest level, information technology and information systems support two important organizational elements-strategy and operations. In this assignment, you will begin an examination of IT in your organization by focusing on how well IT supports these two basic elements. Ultimately, in Assignment #3, you will make recommendations that link back to the content of this assignment.
Requirements
Before beginning your work, review all three assignments and decide on the appropriate business unit to consider. For those of you who work in smaller organizations, you can take on an evaluation of IT for the entire company. For those of you in large organizations, consider narrowing your scope to a specific business unit; Assignment 2, especially, can be challenging if you do not narrow appropriately. If you have any questions, discuss this with your coach before beginning your work.
Introduction
For this assignment, begin by briefly describing your business including: sector or industry; scope; mission; products or services; primary competitors; and market and clientele. If there is other information that you think is pertinent to the report (e.g., recent major organizational changes), feel free to include this as well. This description will serve as your introduction; no further introductory material (e.g., Executive Summary) is required.
Part 1
The first goal of this assignment is to explain, at a high level, how information systems support the business' competitive strategy and/or create value. To do this, you will address three important questions:
1. Identify the primary competitive strategy (or strategies to a maximum of three) that your business is pursuing, using Table 1.2 in your text (p. 23). Explain how IT is being used to support that strategy.
2. Analyze the competitive forces in your industry (following Figure 1.19, p. 22) and explain the extent to which your organization is using IT to respond to the opportunities or challenges these forces provide.
3. Finally, state, with justification, which of the Value Models described in Reading 1:"Chains, shops, and networks: The role of IS in new models of value creation" best fits your organization. Explain the extent to which IT supports the business model.
Part 2
Having considered strategy and how well IT supports that strategy, your second goal is to consider how well IT supports the operations of your business. To do this, you will focus on three important cross-functional business processes and IT's support of these.
To begin, it is important to understand what is meant by a business process.A business process can be defined as a collection of activities that takes inputs from one or more different sources and contributes to achieving a larger organizational goal (Turban et al., 2015; Wysocki, 2007). Business processes have a start and a finish. Order processing, for example, is a process; it starts when an order has been accepted and ends when it has been fulfilled or cancelled. Accounting is not a process; it may fit the first definition but it does not have a specific start and finish.
When we talk about cross-functional processes, we are referring to those business processes that are carried out by multiple people, roles, or organizational units. These processes are of special interest when we are talking about information technology and information systems because they arguably pose the most significant challenges but also the greatest opportunities.
With this understanding, provide an overview of three important cross-functional business processes in your business. Identify the key information that the process requires and the key information it creates. Provide a brief summary of how each cross-functional process and its informational needs are being supported by computer-based information systems. You may find it helpful to consider the value that such systems do or do not add to the organization following the possibilities listed in Table 2.2 on p. 36 of your text. Finally, evaluate IS/IT's support of the process.
You should format your response for each process with the following headings:
Process
Description
Key information inputs
Key information outputs
IT's role in supporting process
Evaluation of IT's role in supporting process
Part 3
So far, this assignment has asked you to consider separately the strategic and operational uses of information technology and information systems in your organization. In this final part of the assignment, you will evaluate the level of this support using the following grid to illustrate the current (C) and desired (D) positions of information technology support in your organization.
This grid is based on a variation of McFarlan's Strategic Grid (Nolan and McFarlan, 2005), which you may read about in an elective reading in Lesson 6. In this variation, the Y-axis captures the extent to which information technology and information systems support the operations of the organization. The X-axis captures the extent to which they support the strategic goals of the organization.
Use the information in Parts 1 and 2, and any other information you believe relevant, to determine where you think your organization currently lies on the grid ("Current"). Briefly justify your assessment. Also, indicate where you think your organization ought to lie("desired") on the grid, and briefly justify.
- To score as highly as possible on each component of this assignment please review the Written Assignment Grading Criteria.
- Your paper should be no more than 2,500 words. Note that the word count does not include words in the title, executive summary, table of contents, or appendices.
- When completed, please post your assignment in the Assignment Dropbox by the due date noted in the Workplan.
Assignment 2 - Use of the Assessment Template for the IT Infrastructure and Architecture in Your Business
Purpose
In Assignment #1 you described an organization and some of its information flows. Your task in Assignment #2 is to gather information concerning various aspects of the IT architecture and infrastructure of the same organization, and assess how well each is accomplished.
Requirements
Use the following IT Infrastructure Assessment Template to gather detailed information about your focal organization's IT architecture and infrastructure:
The completed template is the only thing you need to submit. No executive summary or introduction is required.
- To score as highly as possible on each component of this assignment please review the Written Assignment Grading Criteria.
- There is no word limit to this assignment, but 2,000 words is suggested (in addition to the text of the questions in the Template).
- When completed, please post your assignment in the Assignment Dropbox by the due date noted in the Workplan.
Assignment 3 - Overall Assessment of the IT Infrastructure and Architecture in Your Business and Recommendations
Purpose
In Assignment #1, you described the information strategy and some of the principal information systems of an organization, and assessed the extent to which these supported the strategy, business model, and business processes of your organization. In Assignment #2, you gathered information about the information infrastructure in the same organization and assessed the management of this infrastructure. In Assignment #3, you will formulate recommendations for improvements in the information infrastructure, and provide a risk analysis to support your recommendations.
Requirements
You should begin this assignment with an executive summary. Remember that an executive summary provides highlights of the main findings of a report. Therefore, your executive summary should highlight the main strengths and weaknesses of the IT infrastructure and its alignment with business, and highlight your recommendations for change. A strong executive summary will end by underscoring the importance of these findings for the report's audience (and it will do all of this in one page!).
In the first part of this assignment, you will synthesize the analyses you did in Assignments 1 and 2 to provide an overall evaluation of the IT infrastructure and architecture in your organization. As part of this evaluation, you will draw on your previous assessments to identify the main strengths and weaknesses in the IT function. To make a convincing case, you will need to justify your choice of these strengths and weaknesses as being the most important for the organization. Keep in mind that this section of the assignment is NOT a summary of your previous findings but rather an opportunity to synthesize and prioritize these findings.
Based on Part 1 of the assignment, you will next identify and describe three important improvements that can be made in your organization's information infrastructure. Justify each recommendation by explaining the benefits that are expected to accrue from its implementation. Whenever possible, draw on theory and/or course material to justify and support the possibility of these benefits.
Finally, analyze the costs and risks associated with each recommendation. The detail in your cost estimates will be relative to the size of the recommendation. If the recommendation is small (e.g., purchasing a computer), you should be able to give a reasonably accurate estimate of the costs. If the recommendation is large (e.g., the creation of a PMO), you will be able to provide only high-level "ball-park" estimates. Even a high-level estimate will support you in demonstrating that you have weighed the benefits of your recommendation against its costs. A strong risk analysis will first identify the risks that are inherent in the proposed solutions and then consider both the likelihood that an event may occur and the impact to the organization if the event did occur. Consider how each risk can be mitigated. In this section be sure you consider the risks associated with the recommendations, rather than any risks related to the current situation.
You will then probably find it easiest to organize your paper as follows:
Executive Summary
Introduction
Evaluation of the IT Infrastructure and Architecture
Improvement Number One
Description
Benefits
Cost and Risk Analysis
Improvement Number Two
Description
Benefits
Cost and Risk Analysis
Improvement Number Three
Description
Benefits
Cost and Risk Analysis
- To score as highly as possible on each component of this assignment please review the Written Assignment Grading Criteria.
- Your paper should be no more than 2,500 words. Note that the word count does not include words in the title, executive summary, table of contents, or appendices.
- When completed please post your assignment in the Assignment Dropbox by the due date noted in the Workplan.